What A Time It Was

The Best of W.C. Heinz on Sports

(DaCapo Press, 2001)

"In an era when America's great sportswriters were as big as the athletes they covered, W.C. Heinz may have been the best of the bunch." —Sports Illustrated

"W. C. Heinz shows once again that he has it all - a deep understanding of human nature, a wonderful sense of humor, and a writing style so clear and clean that he makes the difficult seem easy, just the way a great athlete does. As he once said of the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, Heinz, in sportswriting, is the greatest, pound for pound." —David Maraniss, author of When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi

W.C. Heinz was the first sports writer to make his living writing exclusively for magazines in the 1940s and 1950s. Paving the way for the New Journalism of Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, he perfected a fly-on-the-wall style that was imitated by many but surpassed by none. In this 2001 publication by Da Capo, What a Time It Was, Heinz's best writing on sports — both fiction and nonfiction—was collected for the first time. Ranging from his widely anthologized story of the fighter Bummy Davis in "Brownsville Bum," which Jimmy Breslin called the "best magazine sports story of all time," to his classic "Death of Racehorse," from his profile of Vince Lombardi to an excerpt from the novel MASH (which he cowrote with Dr. H. Richard Hornberger under the pseudonym Richard Hooker,) Heinz's legendary gift for concise prose, dry wit, and meticulous detail is on full display.